War in Ukraine: Signs of Putin in the conflict raise debate over ‘Stalinization’

March 20, 2022

Robert

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Russian President Vladimir Putin has chosen a packed stadium that has already hosted the World Cup final and the date of celebration of a military victory – the eight-year anniversary of the annexation of Crimea – to make his first public appearance since the start of the Russian invasion of Russia. Ukraine, which takes place for 25 days.

Surrounded by Russian flags and placards with phrases of support, Putin declared that the country “has never been so strong”.

The mega-event, last Friday (18), ended a week of speeches with a strong nationalist tone that turned on a yellow light for a scenario of hardening of his government – already marked by the restriction of the press and the repression of opponents – towards a dictatorship of fact.

On Wednesday (16), Putin declared on TV that the Russian people “will always distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors” and that the country must “self-purify”;
He also accused the West of spreading lies about the war and applying economic sanctions to “cancel Russia”.

The classification of war critics as “traitors” was echoed by Kemlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov on Thursday. Around 15,000 people were arrested in the country for protesting the war.

Officially, the Kremlin justifies the invasion of Ukrainian territory as an attempt to prevent the advance of NATO (a military alliance in which Ukraine sought to enter), which could bring insecurity to Russia. It also alleges the need to “denazify” the region and guarantee the autonomy of pro-Russian separatist provinces.

But analysts have pointed to a restoration project by Putin as a central motivation: to regain influence over the once-great empire and contain Russia’s economic and symbolic disintegration intensified with the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.

“Putin certainly considers Ukraine’s geopolitical loss, with the country’s approach to structures modeled by the US, as the main defeat of his nationalist project”, analyzes columnist Jaime Spitzcovsky, a former correspondent for the sheet in Moscow and Beijing.

The concept

“When Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, he dreamed of restoring the glory of the Russian empire. But he ended up restoring the terror of Josef Stalin”, described, in the last 12th, an article in The Economist magazine. It is an example of how the “Stalinization” of Russia under Putin has become a current term for the centralization of power and the fear of escalating repression.

Putin has ruled the country for nearly 23 years — alternating between president and prime minister since 1999. His time in power only exceeds the 29 years of dictator Josef Stalin (who ruled from 1924 to 1953, when he died).

To discuss the use of this concept, we invited columnist Celso Rocha de Barros, political scientist and doctor in sociology from the University of Oxford.

How is the rescue of the Soviet past present in Putin’s speech? The USSR enters this imaginary as a moment of Russian national affirmation that comes from much further away. Bolshevism did not always have the same relation to Russian nationalism. Stalin embraced Great Russian nationalism more strongly, not least because he helped to mobilize in the war (“the great patriotic war”, you see).

wants to appropriate Soviet symbology because the USSR was the height of Russia’s world influence, but he always does so as part of a longer narrative of Great Russian nationalism.

Putin has ruled Russia for 23 years, a time second only to Stalin. What elements bring the two regimes closer and further apart? The Putin regime is very different from the Stalin regime. Putin’s regime has some similarities with that of “liberal” communist governments (never democratic) such as that of the Hungarian Janos Kadar, who, after the 1956 invasion, adopted the attitude “if you are not against me, you are with me”, while contrary to Stalinism’s “if you’re not with me, you’re against me”.

Putin cracks down on the opposition, but so far, at least, he hasn’t installed a regime of terror in which anyone can be killed on the paranoid suspicion that, in some scenario, they will become opposition. The difference in brutality between the two regimes is very great.

Do you agree that there is a process of “reinstalinization” of Russia by Putin? I don’t think it’s right to use “Stalinization” for the Putin regime, although I understand that the term could be politically useful for the Russian opposition (or for Ukrainians, by far the biggest victims of Stalinism).

It is perfectly possible to identify similarities with other authoritarian periods in Russia, or the USSR, but Stalinist totalitarianism is a much more brutal phenomenon, born in a very specific historical juncture and, God willing, limited to it.

Do not get lost

The posters with the letter Z seen in the stands of the Luzhniki stadium, where Putin spoke on Friday, are one of the elements of the symbolic war waged in the conflict in Ukraine. We explain this and other signs:

letter Z : Inscribed on tanks and trucks on the Russian side, the letter Z became a sign of support for the invasion of Ukraine. Its primary role in warfare is to identify vehicles to avoid friendly fire — since, on the outside, the equipment on each side is very similar. But the choice of the Latin letter generated different theories that even linked it to the surname of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the Z stands for “Za pobedu” (for victory, in Portuguese).
Blue and yellow: Among Ukraine’s war critics and supporters, the blue and yellow colors of the country’s flag adopted since 1992 are the biggest symbol of support — as is the blue sky landscape over a wheat field that many point to its significance, although there are other versions. It is also these colors that identify Ukrainian military vehicles in combat.
soviet flag: Images of an armored vehicle bearing a USSR flag entering Ukrainian territory were released by the Russian Defense Ministry earlier this month. The gesture was interpreted as a reference to the final years of the Second World War: the defeat of the Nazi occupation by the Red Army in the same region. Putin accuses the Zelensky government of supporting Nazi groups, and “denazification” is one of Russia’s declared goals for invading the country.